Faculty Focus is a monthly publication documenting the activities, accomplishments, and honors of the University of Houston Law Center Faculty.
April 2014
Editor, Katy Stein Badeaux, kastein@central.uh.edu
Previous editions of Faculty Focus can be accessed here.
Janet Beck spoke at the 4th Annual Immigration Symposium at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law on the 5th Amendment Right to Counsel and Due Process in Immigration Proceedings as well as on Family-Sponsored Immigration Law. The Symposium was co-sponsored by the UH Law Center, Thurgood Marshall School of Law, South Texas College of Law and the Houston Bar Association.
Zack Bray spoke at the University of Washington Law School’s Faculty Colloquium on issues related to a recent article, The Hidden Rise of 'Efficient' (De)Listing, on April 10. The article will be published this month by the Maryland Law Review.
Marcilynn Burke was the featured speaker on offshore energy in the Southeast at a program sponsored by the University of North Carolina School of Law’s Center for Law, Environment, Adaptation, and Resources and the N.C. Coastal Resources Law, Planning, and Policy Center. She also helped to organize a very successful symposium on the role of planning on federal lands and in federal waters. The symposium was sponsored by the Law Center’s Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Center, the George Washington University Law School, and the Environmental Law Institute.
David R. Dow spoke at the annual CLE to benefit the ESCAPE Family Resource Center, on April 3. His topic was "Preventing Executions by Preventing Homicide." On April 5, he was a featured speaker at the annual San Antonio Book Festival. His most recent book, Things I've Learned from Dying, has been acquired by the South Korean publisher Cheom Publishing. Dow's work with the Texas Innocence Network was featured in a full-length BBC documentary, which aired in the UK on March 31. The film focused on two TIN death penalty cases, and featured the work of TIN's supervising attorneys, Jeff Newberry and Erin Osborn, and highlighted the efforts of TIN students, especially Kelly Hickman, who is now a TIN attorney.
Barbara Evans participated in a molecular diagnostics workshop in Scottsdale on April 3 and spoke about liability issues with next-generation genetic sequencing at a roundtable hosted by Arizona State University on April 4. She participated in two meetings of the Texas Medical Center’s Clinical Research Institute design team and in a teleconference of the Food and Drug Law Institute’s Academic Programs Committee, of which she is a member. She spoke about genomic data access at the IPIL spring Advisory Council dinner on April 17. Her symposium piece, Sustainable Access to Data for Postmarketing Medical Product Safety Surveillance under the Amended HIPAA Privacy Rule, appears in print this month in Case Western’s Health Matrix Symposium on Non-treatment Uses of Electronic Medical Records. On April 20, she submitted her final manuscript, Preventing Harms to Patients Who Know Too Much about Their Own Genomes, for the 2014 Petrie-Flom Annual Conference at Harvard on May 2-3. Her article, Economic Regulation of Genomic Data Access after Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, is scheduled to go to press on April 30 in a special issue of Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics on next-generation sequencing edited by Amy L. McGuire and Robert Cook-Deegan. On April 2, the Institute of Medicine published its report, Health Standards for Long Duration and Exploration Spaceflights: Ethics Principles, Responsibilities, and Decision Framework, for which Professor Evans was a co-author.
Tracy Hester participated in an invitational workshop hosted by Berkeley Law and the Center for Bipartisan Policy on climate engineering governance on March 31 in San Francisco. He hosted and introduced Professor Nigel Banks of Calgary Law School, the Spring 2014 EENR Center Speaker, on April 3, and he spoke at South Texas College of Law on April 7 as part of a panel on the legal issues surrounding climate change and emerging environmental legal issues. The Environmental Law Reporter also accepted his article on the legality of scoping under international law for publication in its Winter 2014 issue.
Geoffrey Hoffman will receive the Elmer Fried Excellence in Teaching Award in recognition of outstanding professors in the area of immigration law from AILA. The awards ceremony will be held in Boston on June 21, 2014 at the annual AILA national Conference. He also spoke at the People’s Law School and Admitted Students Day. A letter to the editor by Professor Hoffman was published in the New York Times.
Craig Joyce submitted for publication his draft of LAW REVIEW: The First Fifty Years of Hous. L. Rev. and accompanied Justice (Ret.) Sandra Day O’Connor to book signings of Out of Order (dedicated to Joyce and her clerks) at the Tucson Festival of Books (120,000 attendees).
Sapna Kumar participated in American University Washington College of Law’s Annual Patent Administrative Law Symposium. She spoke on a panel titled “The ITC: Stare Decisis and Administrative Deference.” Her article, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Genetic Information was published in the Alabama Law Review (65 Ala. L. Rev. 625).
Jacqueline Lipton’s article, Derivative Works 2.0: Reconsidering Transformative Use in the Age of Crowdsourced Creation (with J. Tehranian) has been accepted for publication in the Northwestern University Law Review.
Jessica Mantel’s article, A Defense of Physicians’ Gatekeeping Role: Balancing Patients’ Needs with Society’s Interests, has been accepted for publication in the Pepperdine Law Review.
Douglas Moll was chosen by the Order of the Barons as its Professor of the Year. He was also chosen as a hooder (along with Meredith Duncan) by the 2014 graduating class. Professor Moll has submitted the manuscript for the 12th edition of his Business Organizations casebook (with Jon Macey) to West. He was also asked by the Loyola Law Review to write an article on the new Louisiana business organizations statute, and he has agreed to do so. In April, Professor Moll spoke at an ABA conference in Phoenix on business divorce. He joined a panel of litigators and bloggers on the subject.
Gerry Moohr has been invited to produce a second edition of her book, Criminal Law of Intellectual Property and Information for West. Jacqueline Lipton and Irina Mantel from Hofstra University are joining as co-authors in what will be a substantial update.
Raymond Nimmer has been appointed as a Distinguished Senior Commentator for the George Mason Mark Twain Copyright Fellowship Program. He has also joined the Academic Advisory Committee for the Motion Picture Association of America. A revised edition of his treatise, Modern Licensing Law, with co-author Jeff Dodd was published by Thomson-West.
Michael A. Olivas spoke on the Fisher v. Texas litigation to the Annual Meeting of the American Dental Education Association and delivered the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture on DACA and Immigration/Higher Education litigation (18 cases and counting) at the UTSA School for Public Policy. The American Educational Research Association (25,000 members) gave him its 2014 Social Justice in Education Award and at the AERA Annual Meeting, he delivered the Award Lecture, Drafting Justice: Statutory Language, Public Policy, and Legislative Reform.
Jordan Paust was a panel member at a symposium on The United States Role in International Human Rights at the Duke University School of Law on March 21st.
Jessica Roberts presented her paper The Privatization of Health Policy at the Third Annual ERISA, Employee Benefits, and Social Insurance National Conference at Marquette Law School on March 28 and her paper The Harm in Asking at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference in Chicago on April 5.
Greg Vetter presented Are Prior User Rights Good for Software? (available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2410689) at PatCon4: The Patent Conference, held at the University of San Diego School of Law on April 4 and 5, 2014. Professor Vetter also presented Deleveraging the Software License in Health Information Technology at the 2014 Intellectual Property Scholars Roundtable event held at Drake University Law School on March 28 and 29, 2014.
Jacqueline Weaver was the keynote speaker at the NACLE conference in Vancouver, on the topic of "North American Energy Independence in an Era of Globalization and Climate Change." She also participated in a panel on Mexican energy reforms. She thanks Steve Zamora for helping to organize such a great conference with so much student and faculty interchange about issues affecting the US, Mexico and Canada.
Bret Wells' article entitled Income Tax Treaty Policy in the 21st Century: Residence vs. Source, 5 Colum. Tax J. 1 (2013) (with C. Lowell) was republished in India in the leading tax journal of that county and appeared as Income Tax Treaty Policy in the 21st Century: Residence vs. Source, 10 Int'l Tax'n 181 (March 2014) (India). On April 1, Professor Wells testified as an expert witness before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations at the hearing on Caterpillar's Offshore Tax Strategy. His testimony can be found at http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/hearings/caterpillars-offshore-tax-strategy. On April 3, Professor Wells presented his paper entitled Tax Base Erosion: Reformation of Section 482’s Arm’s Length Standard at Northwestern University as part of their Advanced Topics in Taxation Speaker Series. The paper has been accepted for publication by the Florida Tax Review.
Kellen Zale presented her article Urban Resiliency and Destruction at the University of Idaho's Resilient Cities Symposium on April 4. The article will be published in an upcoming symposium edition of the Idaho Law Review.
Steve Zamora attended the biennial Workshop of the North American Consortium on Legal Education (NACLE), held at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, on March 14 and 15, 2014. The theme of the Workshop was “Pipelines and Policies: Re-energizing North America,” and focused in energy law, environmental protection, property rights, and other issues of interest to Canada, Mexico and the United States. Professor Jacqueline Weaver was the keynote speaker for the Workshop, Professor Tracy Hester participated in a panel discussion of a collaborative project involving the NACLE Consortium and the North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation. Professor Zamora is the founder and director of NACLE, a consortium of 13 law schools in Canada, Mexico and the United States, and the UH Law Center serves as the administrative office of NACLE. Four NACLE Student Coordinators, all 3Ls at UHLC, also participated in the Workshop: Veronica Bernal, Olivia Mathias, Brittany Mortimer and Emma Raimi-Zlatic. For more information on NACLE and on the Workshop, see http://www.nacle.org/